I'm the author of the SC article and got to play it at Gamescom. I completely understand your concerns, but from what I've seen, the game is quite complete without DLC and the online part is actually quite a lot of fun. You can team up online with friends to build cities that complement each other, using a different focus for each city so you can specialize in what you want and still benefit from the specialization of your friend(s). It's really well done.

Of course EA - will - milk the DLC something fierce, but at this point, I think you can largely ignore it.

Problem is, I don't want to team up with friends, why would I? SimCity has always been an offline single player experience, why should I be forced to go online to play the game in a way I have not asked nor do not want?

Unless SC5 has a solid offline mode or rather, a solid single player mode without forcing us to go online I will not be touching this.